SIÂN BOWEN
Commissioned prose work to accompany a suite of prints.
Grizedale Residency May 2000
Fragility and Preservation
Milton, speaking of the fallen angels in his epic poem Paradise Lost, described Mammon as having a stoop from spending all his time before the expulsion, staring down at “Heaven’s pavements, trodden gold” but those of us who love to walk along beaches and whose eyes keep returning to the sand beneath our feet, who stop to retrieve an interesting shell, who hold a stone in one hand as we walk, feeling the shape, perhaps attracted to a certain colour in it, a certain patterning - we hope not to be aligned with the damned.
In a forest, in a high wind, you can feel the ground move beneath your feet because everything will take only a finite weight, and just as the surface of a pond will support a pond skater but not you or me, so a forest floor will support us but not a falling oak; and though we might remember how for each tree there’s the same growth below the ground as there is above it, with a hundred feet of root systems gripping the earth with as much strength as can be mustered, yet we know that sometimes such strength is no longer enough, and roots rip apart, another tree falls, and a waving canopy becomes then just so many tons of timber hitting the ground, falling through the lightly layered surface of leaves and brush, shattering the teeming metropolis beneath.
Time was, people lived here a little more easily with their own deaths than we do now - bodies laid out, bodies placed in boxes, bodies buried - and death was seen to be decay, death was that final change; with old jokes about “pushing up daisies” and the like, people could line their minds, cushion themselves against the inevitable, that one unalterable fact which, for the existentialists, rendered life absurd; people would gently underline links between body and meat, between decay and renewal, hang meat till it was high, put horseshit on the spuds, and bury the dog in the garden; yet now we worship Hygiene, a god we love but do not understand.
Our bodies are home to millions of organisms, which may be benign and may be not; on every millimetre, something is happening and if it could be amplified, and magnified, would be a ceaseless roar of battle and procreation; truth is, Nature never stops clubbing, and in Africa you can see brand new buildings cracking apart as termites go about their business: termites don’t do heritage, and for us, sure as sure, there’s no standing still; permanence is humanity’s maddest ambition.
During her residency, lasting some three months in Grizedale forest, although Siân Bowen had planned to make large-scale work, perhaps assuming in advance how such a vast and dramatic landscape would inspire her, in the event she didn’t respond to the place in that way and instead made a series of small and intimate pieces.
Leaving sheets of paper on the ground - or rather, lightly buried in the ground - she would return, after seven to ten days, to these benign traps, and then take the paper back to her studio for additional work, like a conventional landscape artist returning with sketches done en plein air … sometimes she would allow natural processes, the formation of fungae for example, to continue in the studio, shielding the paper from the drying atmosphere of the room; other times she would work and re-work the surface herself; other times still, and often, the paper would be useless and have to be discarded.
Applying pure pigment or materials such as copper dust, sometimes piercing the paper from the back, so making rhythms of marks, sometimes by drawing, she has enriched the surface of the paper and at the same time preserved elements from the natural activity: traces remain from fungae, ghosts remain from spores, in some instances the paper has been partly eaten.
There are recurring motifs: a small curling shape, like a long thin bending spring, is one; a spider-like form is another, and the latter is often inverted, or so indirectly spiderish that we might as easily read it as a plant form of some kind, a seed pod perhaps or a flower; it may be repeated over and over, making a block or a pattern which interacts with the patterns formed by such things as fungae, insects, water; this can be seen both as a playful and as an anti-figurative device (spiders don’t form into tight formations) and yet since other creatures, such as geese in flight, do form such patterns, the play remains within the gamut of natural forms.
When the old church was restored, which serves as Bowen’s studio, a huge wasps’ nest was found in the rafters and it rests now, balanced, on a small table; in it you can see that a shape recurs thousands of times (a small curving blade-like shape) which is the building block of “reconstituted wood” made by the insects, a kind of natural MDF but as delicate as any paper and this nest as a whole forms a stupendous image of incessant co-ordinated activity over generations.
Working with such materials as old wallpapers salvaged from abandoned homes, or slabs of plaster bearing traces of old decorative colours, Bowen restores to life that which has been abandoned, and thus both preserves and yet transforms things; she’s engaged in fruitful change, and though her finished work might look quiet and delicate, a battery of materials and techniques have been brought to bear until she’s satisfied.
Siân Bowen engages in an art practice which remains within, and indeed reveals, the beautiful mathematic inherant in natural forms. We might like to draw a line between the traces left by natural action on the one hand and human action on the other, but she rubs away at that line until it disappears. Her work can include both a slowing down of natural processes and an acceleration, but either way, she picks at the point of balance between change and stasis, between fragility and preservation.